


Ice Lalli

by spiderstanspiderstan



Category: Stand Still Stay Silent
Genre: Fluff, Huddling For Warmth, Hypothermia, M/M, Sharing a Body, but magic bullshitty hypothermia so you can't get on my case about it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-19
Updated: 2018-02-19
Packaged: 2019-03-08 16:31:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,711
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13462119
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spiderstanspiderstan/pseuds/spiderstanspiderstan
Summary: Some people say that touch is grounding.





	Ice Lalli

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tentaclekitten](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tentaclekitten/gifts).



_ The smaller you are, the faster you freeze. _

It was a simple fact of life, one that had cropped up- and spawned jokes- throughout Emil’s education. It had never really seemed pertinent, first because Emil had been too chubby and sheltered for it to be relevant, and then because he’d been through enough training to avoid hypothermia altogether. 

Or, so he thought. 

Lalli was small. Lalli was  _ tiny _ \- maybe forty-five kilos, if that.

Emil adjusted the straps of his makeshift sledge on his shoulders. The fabric was beginning to cut into his hands. 

Lalli’s build was useful only in that it made him easier to lug around. Carrying him would have been easy, but Emil needed his arms free. Light as Lali was, the dead weight of an unoccupied human was far more unwieldy to carry in a piggyback. He’d had no choice to keep Lalli on the ground. 

The cold, cold ground.

Fat white snowflakes drifted down, peppering their coats and hair. 

Emil paused, briefly, to look at the body. It was strange, seeing him like this- watching the slow rise and fall of his chest, knowing that in there, his heart still beat- but seeing no trace of Lalli at all. 

Because Lalli slept through so much of the day, that was how Emil knew him best; curled up in some cosy corner, taking small, soft breaths, shifting occasionally on the movements of his dreams. This was nothing like that. The body- because that was what it was now, a body- was perfectly still, limp against the fabric. It had taken on the eerie emptiness of the town surrounding them. 

Emil stooped to brush away some of the snow, feeling oddly self-conscious. Could Lalli see through his eyes, right now? How would he excuse the tenderness? 

_**Why did you stop? Did you get us lost?** _

The words fell directly into Emil’s mind, without the courtesy of telling his ears about it beforehand. He’d never quite be comfortable with Lalli speaking to him inside his own head. He wasn’t comfortable with Lalli being inside his head in general. There were some rather personal things in there, some of which  concerned Lalli, and if he ever managed to see them, Emil would have to kick him out of his body and jump through a frozen lake. 

“I’m not lost,” Emil said. His voice cut through the silence, the words given form as short, angry puffs of white breath. 

Back at Lalli’s body, soft lips were beginning to tinge blue. He wasn’t shivering- it was one of the higher responses he lost in a state like this. Right now, he didn’t even have reflexes. 

Emil was not one for gods. It wasn’t as if he was  _ Finnish _ . But prayer never hurt. 

* * *

Salvation came in the form of another old building. This one had brickwork intact; crumbling orangeish edges that must have done a lot of the work of keeping it standing. They were lucky; another usable fireplace; more furniture to drag into place to trap the heat. A space out of the biting cold.

But it didn’t seem to be enough. 

Lalli- the shell of Lalli, the limp, lifeless body that Lalli owned- remained cold. Even basked in the orange glow of the firelight, his lips were dusky. 

Well. 

Desperate times. 

Emil began to unbutton his coat. 

It was just a body. If he contextualised it as a  _ body _ , he could cope with it.

Lalli didn’t seem very active in their shared mind-space, now. Sometimes he fell silent- most likely fell asleep- and maybe it was better that now was one of those times. If he’d spoken up, though, Emil wouldn’t have felt like such a creep. There was no charm in doing this; fumbling with buttons and limp, heavy, ragdolling limbs. 

He wrestled Lalli out of his clothes, spread their shirts as a barrier to the cool of the floor, and held the slim body close, cocooning them in their coats.

Lalli was all cold, cream-coloured skin and collarbones, the hummingbird beat of his pulse fluttering against Emil’s skin where they touched. The contact felt sweltering, as necessary as it was. There was so much  _ skin _ involved- the places where the bumps of Lalli’s arched spine pressed into Emil’s stomach, the tangle of their limbs, the tickle of his hair. 

Could Lalli feel his body from outside it? Could he feel the exhaustion it must be fraught with, the hunger and dehydration and cold? 

Was he aware of the touch? 

Would it help? 

They didn’t have a sleeping bag. In training, they’d always used sleeping bags for scenarios like this. Heat donation, before proper hypothermia set in. The more closely sealed you could be, the better. Their bodies were isolated by the cradle of their clothing, but if they moved enough, there’d be gaps. 

It wasn't as if conventional physics could be perfectly relied upon here, anyway. Lalli seemed to operate on the same logic that allowed sleeping beauty to be comatose for a century without wetting the bed once. 

Emil adjusted their position, splaying his fingers across Lalli’s flat stomach, as if that would give them more area of contact. When Lalli was completely sandwiched between the warmth of the fire and the warmth of his body, he was satisfied. 

He wouldn’t want to deal with the consequences if he failed here- Lalli would probably throw one hell of a tantrum if he came back to his body in a state of disrepair. That would ruin the begrudging bond they’d built. 

It must be terrible. Stepping back into your own skin and having weeks of accumulated need all hit you at once. 

Emil had, early in his training, been involved in an accident. He remembered the slow swim back to consciousness, the pain that had pressed in before everything else.

He wanted Lalli to wake to something better than that. 

For a while, he just watched the flickering of the fire, letting his thoughts slowly fade. At some point, his eyes fell closed.

* * *

When Emil woke up, it was to sunlight, streaming through the gap in their makeshift heat-guard.

Sunlight, and- as he dragged his heavy eyelids open- 

Blue.

The vibrant, focused blue of Lalli’s eyes, like a slice of the summer sky.

He was finally awake. Awake and  _ conscious _ \- alert again, all on his own- and dressed. Which Emil wasn't.

Lalli blinked at him, and snorted slightly in amusement as Emil blushed to the point of fluorescence.

“Could you-” Emil began, wrapping his coat more tightly around himself. Then he realised.

Lalli wasn't in his head, anymore. Their language barrier was back. 

Emil scrambled to think of explanations he could communicate in gesture. Even if he had words, he couldn’t have strung them together effectively- he was too embroiled in the opposing tides of embarrassment and joy. 

Lalli awake and moving made him feel oddly graceless.The boy rose to prod the embers of the fire, sunshine filtering through the silvery fluff of his bed-hair. Even now, disheveled and slightly unsteady, he seemed ethereal, like something carved from marble. As inaccessible and otherworldly as the statues Emil had seen in the wrecks of museums.  

As always, Lalli was hyperaware; too keyed in to the environment. He turned as Emil tugged his trousers on, twitching at the movement in their little nest. 

Starting upright, Emil found himself surprisingly tired. It was clear that he’d lost more than body heat. He could  _ feel  _ his heartbeat. Abruptly, his practiced disinterest in privacy evaporated. He’d spend hundreds of hours in shared showers during training, but now, he felt utterly exposed. 

Lalli cocked his head like a curious kitten. For once, Emil was the weird one.

Emil yanked his shirt over his head, averted his eyes. Had he overstepped a boundary? Lalli was...private, as a person. He gave the impression that he had a personal bubble several miles in diameter, and was irritated at having so many people in it. 

It wasn’t like Emil had never seen him naked. With Lalli, there were firm,  _ different _ lines, that were mostly found through trial, error, and the awful moments where he shut down completely. 

There’d been a lot of that, recently.  

“Emil.”  

That prompted more attention. Lalli didn’t waste words. He barely used them in the first place. 

Lalli was smiling. It didn’t quite look natural on him- it was an utterly borrowed gesture. A borrowed gesture that drew the eye to his mouth. 

He stumbled over the next few sounds. His tongue tripped on the dismount after  _ t _ ; the vowels were clumsily molded. But Emil still recognised it, and something warm and golden glowed in his chest as Lalli thanked him. 

He returned the smile. 

Lalli, surprisingly, took the next step. A desperate sort of determination flashed across his face, and he grabbed a handful of Emil’s sleeve, moving in closer. There was a clumsiness to it- it was almost wholly mirrored movement, built on imitation rather than instinct.  

In anyone else, the body language would have been blindingly obvious. But because this was Lalli, whom the actions, in some way, didn’t belong to, it still took him by surprise. 

The kiss was a chaste, tentative thing, at first- the nervous sort of contact established when neither participant completely knew the rules. Lalli led the motion, his fingers grazing Emil’s scalp as he fisted a hand in his hair. When Emil didn’t pull back- because he was beginning to lose track of the rest of his body, because there were some things denial just couldn’t weather- Lalli deepened the kiss.  

Soon, though, they needed air. There was a moment of peace, where the world seemed to have ceased to exist outside the bubble of their shared breath. 

When they parted, as much as they could in the confined space, something was different. The antsy, anxious tension they’d had for almost the entirety of the mission was gone.  

Emil understood at once why he’d done it- the performance of conventional communication; the absolute assurance that his meaning would be known. 

They might not make it back to the rest of the group.

They probably wouldn’t make it to the ship. 

And they almost certainly wouldn't make it home. 

But at very least, they had this. 

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to ArisTGD for beta reading!
> 
> follow me on my new fic tumblr [here!](http://na-no-why-mo.tumblr.com)


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